Chester Carlson

The Father of Copying - the Swedish-American who unleached the incredible paper flow

Next time you make a copy send a thankful thought to Swedish American Chester Carlson. It was he who revolutionized every office in the world with his invention of a simple and quick copying method.

Today all you have to do is push a button. Before Carlson came up with his invention you had to use expensive repro photographic methods and messy carbon papers to get copies, or there were the damp Eastern Kodak Verifax copies, slow and costly photostat machines or the expense of making a master for a mimeograph machine.

Today we make more than two billion copies a day. Chester Carlson's first copy, bearing the legend "10-22-38 ASTORIA" took more than three years of experimentation. After Chester had secured his patents in 1942; there was a further struggle before a manufacturer got interested and it took until 1959 before the Haloid Corporation (now Xerox) introduced the lust 914 fully automatic plain paper copier.

Chester Carlson was born in Seattle on February 8, 1906. His grandparents on both sides came from Sweden and homesteaded in Minnesota. His father was a barber who was brought down with a severe case of tuberculosis a year after Chester was born. "As if that was not enough," said Carlson in an interview "he also developed arthritis of the spine, the two together rapidly reducing him to a bent, emaciated wreck of a man who was to spend the greater part of each day for the next 26 years lying flat on his back, wracked by coughing spells and defeated by the world. This, plus the resulting poverty and isolation, was to have a profound effect on my development."
The family moved around quite a bit before settling in San Bernardino in California. Even though Chet was the family's chief income earner when he started working after school and during weekends at age fourteen, he graduated from high school and majored in chemistry at junior college. He graduated with a degree in physics just at the start of the Depression. It took eighty-two job applications before he landed a $35 a week job as a research engineer in New York and later got a position with the electronics firm of P.R. Mallory & Co. Carlson took a law degree at night school and was promoted to manager for the company's patent department.

"By 1935 I was more or less settled. I had my job, but I didn't think I was getting ahead very fast," said Carlson. "I was living from hand to mouth, you might say, and I had just got married. It was kind of a hard struggle. So I thought the possibility of making an invention might kill two birds with one stone; it would be a chance to do the world some good and also a chance to do myself some good".

Chester Carlson had always found himself short of carbon copies of patent specifications
at work. This got him thinking and he spent many months of his spare time reviewing literature on graphic methods in the New York Public Library before he started experimenting in his kitchen in Jackson Heights.

"My experiments became very unpopular around the house," said Carlson, so in the fall of 1938 he hired a physicist, a refugee from Germany, and rented a back room with his savings to perfect the basic principles of electrophotography (xerography).

A break-through was not long in coming. In Carlson's own words: "October 22, 1938, was a historic occasion. I went to the lab that day and Otto had a freshly-prepared sulphur coating on a zinc plate. We tried to see what we could do toward making a visible image. Otto took a glass microscope slide and printed on it in India ink the notation `10-2238-ASTORIA'.

We pulled down the shade to make the room as dark as possible, then he rubbed the sulphur surface vigorously with a handkerchief to apply an electrostatic charge, laid the slide on the surface and placed the combination under a bright incandescent lamp for a few seconds. The slide was then removed and lycopodium powder was sprinkled on the sulphur surface. By gently blowing on the surface all the loose powder was removed and there was left on the surface a near-perfect duplicate in powder of the notation which had been printed on the glass slide.
Both of us repeated the experiment several times to convince ourselves that it was true, then we made some permanent copies by transferring the powder images to wax paper and heating the sheets to melt the wax. Then we went out to lunch and to celebrate."

It took another ten years before the Haloid company could make the first public announcement about xerography. By then Chet had contacted twenty indifferent companies and the National Inventors Council before selling off 60 percent of future royalties towards applied research by the B atelle Development Corporation. It was not until 1959, twentyone years after Carlson invented xerography that the first convenient office copier using xerography was unveiled. The 914 copier could make copies quickly at the touch of a button on plain paper. It was a phenomenal success in time before the patent ran out.

Xerography was the foundation stone of what has become a gigantic worldwide copying industry, including Xerox and other corporations which make and market copiers and duplicators producing billions and billions of copies a year.

And to Carlson, who had endured and struggled for so long, came fame, wealth and honor, all of which he accepted with a grace and modesty much in keeping with his. shy and quiet personality.

Even during the hectic and heady 1960s, when the 914 and successor products were spelling glory for Xerox, Carlson remained in the background, and he gave his opinion only when asked.

"I prefer anonymity," he once said during a tour of a manufacturing plant.

During Carlson's last years he was given dozens of honors for his pioneering work, including the Inventor of the Year in 1964 and the Horatio Alger Award in 1966. He died of a stroke in a New York street in 1968.

Had he held onto it all, Carlson would have earned well over $150 million from his remarkable invention. But before he died he had given away some $ 100 million to various foundations and charities.

COMPANY FILE
What we know as "The Document Company XEROX" started as the Haloid Company in 1906 making and selling photographic paper. With a shrinking market share after booming war years, the small company was desperately looking for a promising new technology to develop.

After reading an article on electrography in the technical periodical Radio News, the young managing director contacted inventor Chester Carlson and a contract effective July 1, 1947 was signed. It was an enormous undertaking for the company that in 1946 only made $101000 on $6.75 million in sales. Developing a xerographic office copier proved extremely costly and Haloid, finding no partner, was forced to either quit or go for broke.

In 1960, the first 914 copier (so named because it could copy sheets as large as 9 by 14 inches) was shipped to customers and became an instant success.

It had been an enormous gamble that paid off handsomely. Some $ 12.5 million - more than the company's total earnings between 1950 and 1959 had been spent to develop the 914 by borrowing and pouring profits back into research.

By the end of 1962, 10 000 copiers had been shipped, and there was a backlog of orders. By then the name of the company had changed to Xerox and earnings had reached $13.9 million a year.

During 1995 document processing revenues grew by 10% to $ 16.6 billion a year and the company could post a healthy $1.1 billion profit. Even though the Carlson patents have long expired, Xerox is still the leader in a $200 billion global document market.

Xerox controls about $10 billion of the $ 35 billion black-and-white copier market world-wide. About two-thirds of Xerox's $ 25 billion in revenues is generated outside the U.S.

Revenue from colour copier products _grew by 45 % to $ 600 million last year.

In 1990 Xerox introduced digital print-on-demand and is now leading a revolution that will eventually change printing as we know it. The Xerox Docu Tech Production Publisher creates, captures, stores and distributes documents electronically and prints only the copies required. This means, for instance, that Whirlpool's Swedish manufacturing operations for microwave ovens for the worldwide market print and bind their guides when the need arises. Lead time for the booklets has thus been cut from three weeks to eight hours.